The historic and terrifying Dickson County legend of a headless phantom soldier seen wandering the railroad tracks at McNairy Cut is a key story in the new book Southern Ghost Stories: Tennessee Tales Two by author and “American Hauntstorian” Allen Sircy.
The book revisits the Civil War-era violence that gave birth to one of Middle Tennessee’s most chilling ghost stories.
Sircy’s collection details the history of McNairy Cut, a stretch of the Nashville and Northwestern Military Railroad that was the site of violent raids by Confederate partisans in October 1864. The book recounts how, by the early 1890s, the area had become infamous for sightings of a headless apparition…